Let's see....since posting last, I've been mostly focussed on the usual semester academic drudgery. For instance, right now I'm blogging to procrastinate from reading Gottlob Frege's "The Foundations of Arithmetic" for my History of Analytic Philosophy class. (Which, I hasten to add, is more entertaining than it sounds. Frege actually had a pretty nasty sense of humor.)

On the other hand, I did actually got out to South Beach (for the first time since late July), which was good. Got to hang out with some of the new grad students, went to a jazz club, played a couple of games of pool with my housemate (both of which I won), smoked a stogie, had a few drinks and some good Indian food. and ended the night at the always lovely, bizarre Automatic Slim's. (For anyone who's critted my recent stuff, this is the place I very-thinly-fictionalized as "Automatic Shady's," the mildly-futuristic South Beach club in my first post-Clarion, "Broken in the Shadow of Mind." I suitably updated the music, clothes, and ID-checking technology, but otherwise, it's exactly the same place, right down to the waitresses dancing around the counter top pouring shots down people's throats.) Otherwise, I've still been working on the long-term w.i.p., and I actually finished a new short story this week, "Einstein, Degenerate Art and the True Meaning of K-Day." A short extract:

#

Will signed the credit card receipt for his Boston to Detroit monorail ticket, and tried not to think about the Jews and Communists and "degenerate elements" who’d died back in the 1950’s, building the tracks. It wasn’t easy, with the chemical backwash from his senior thesis still giving him flashbacks every few hours.

"Anything else, sir?" The attendant looked bored.

"Flesh burned to ashes," Will muttered.

"Huh?" Will was the last person in line and the attendant, a kid about Will’s age with red hair and freckles, had already stuck his iPod headphones back in his ears. He started to take them out, but Will waved him not to and walked away.

It did, though. Flesh burned to ashes, and bones were ground to dust. While all those happy Middle Americans were parked in the drive-in theatres in Levittown watching cheesy sauerkraut westerns with their racially pure blond housewives and 1.5 children, the emaciated hulls of human beings were being forced to dig their own graves in camps 50 miles upstate.....